BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (21 page)

"Nokes would miss his chance to stake on one
of the Klondike creeks once the Circle stampede got to Dawson. If
he knowed what they knowed, Nokes would tell 'em to head upriver
and stake. He would grubstake 'em in exchange for a share of their
claims. They could leave a note for him at the ACC warehouse
telling him to meet them in Dawson. And right now they was in
better position to move and keep moving than the other miners that
was sliding out the door.

"Gig listened to Wylie and knowed he was
right, except for the part about leaving a note for Nokes and
sharing the claims. When he thought about it for a few minutes,
everything that ever bothered Gig about Sam Nokes come back to the
surface and cracked like a whip. It was better to make a clean
break with him, and this was the time to do it."

Chapter 23

"It's two-hundred-twenty miles back upriver
from Circle to Dawson, and even with a good dog-team and solid ice,
that's a hard tramp. Others was ahead of Gig and Wylie, so at least
the trail was packed, but that ain't saying it was smooth. Up
toward the passes, the lakes freeze and melt and freeze again, and
the wind blows 'em flat and clean, but the river is a different
story. It freezes and melts in different places, and cakes of ice
flow downstream and get jammed together and snowed over. When the
river freezes for good, you got stacks and humps taller than a man
piled up with no rhyme or reason, and you either got to find your
way around 'em or carry the sleds across yourself. Even where the
ice looks flat it's full of crevices and ledges, so the dogs
stumble and cut their feet and the sleds turn sideways or tip
over.

"It's easier when you're coming up behind an
island, so when there's islands the trail snakes from one to
another. But that don't make it any shorter. Still, sledding up to
Dawson from Circle ain't nearly as rough as the upper Yukon back to
the lakes – when that fast water freezes and breaks and locks up
again, you get ramps and ice cliffs forty feet high.

"After you spent a few hours watching your
dogs slip and yelp and taking them in and out of harness, you start
to wonder whether you'd be better off without 'em. Especially when
you're out for ten days on the ice and half of what they're pulling
is their own food. But that feeling goes away every time you pass
some poor devil dragging his sled into the wind at night. And in
December it's almost always night.

"Gig and Wylie was better off than most of
the miners stampeding out of Circle. While Gig was cutting trees
back at Mammoth Creek, he got comfortable with the dogs and learned
how to handle a loaded sled on a hillside, so a bumpy trail on the
ice wasn't no worse than he was used to. And they had enough food
and a small tent and a stove, all of it bought from Jack McQuesten
and charged to Sam Nokes.

"On a few nights they camped in the lee of an
island with other miners heading for Dawson. If you pack the tents
close enough together you get some shelter from the wind, and the
heat don't seem to disappear as fast. But you still wake up most
mornings with new snow frozen to the roof and sides. Other nights
they was by themselves.

"Their last night on the ice before Dawson,
the clouds disappeared and it was about the coldest night of the
year. When the wind dies down, every step on crusted snow and every
breath you take cracks and echoes in the air. If you look up, you
see the stars have doubled, and it makes you dizzy just trying to
pull the constellations out of the chatter. Gig and Wylie made camp
on the sheltered side of a small island a few miles below Fort
Reliance. A bigger island just upstream pushed the current through
a channel that made the small island a trash heap for driftwood.
You can spot that kind of thing after a few weeks on a raft.

"While Gig was lighting the stove and heating
up dried salmon for the dogs, Wylie crossed the island and dug some
sticks and branches out of the snow on the upstream bank. They got
a decent fire going behind a screen of trees near the tent and was
able to have dinner outside and stay warm.

"When they was finished Wylie went back to
the upstream bank to get more driftwood, and Gig headed to the tent
to make coffee. He let it brew and come out to the check on the
dogs. They was all curled together in the snow and staring at the
sky, so Gig looked up and saw waves and swirls of fire, only they
was green and gold and pink and purple, like ghosts the color of
stained glass.

Zimmerman pauses for the first time since Gig
and Wylie left Circle. He checks the whiskey in his cup and inhales
its vapors before knocking back a slug, then looks at me with
apparent condescension in his sunken, watery eyes.

"You ever been north, Owen?"

"No," I admit. "Not past Chicago."

He snorts and leans back against the wall,
seeming genuinely amused.

"There's things you can't see until you go
past what's comfortable."

The room seems suddenly warmer and tighter,
so I take another sip to relax my shoulders.

"Northern lights is one. I seen 'em for the
first time in Alaska a year later, when I was working as a packer
on the Skagway trail, still trying to put together an outfit so I
could make my way Inside.

"Wylie seen 'em too, that night, and he come
running out through the trees. Didn't bother dropping wood on the
fire 'cause his arms was empty. Instead he goes straight to the
sled, unstraps his rifle, and loads a shot. 'She's here!' he tells
Gig. 'I seen her!'

"Gig tries to ask what he's talking about but
Wylie got a wild look in his eyes and won't stand still. He says
she was staring at him from the island across the channel, and he's
going back to the upstream bank to shoot her."

"Shoot who?"

"The Indian girl. The one that swamped his
boat at Miles Canyon, and was going to keep coming back until she
killed him. The girl that was glowing like the sky in his
dreams."

"I thought you said Wylie was sane. You said
you met him later in Dawson and he told you he had dreams about an
Indian girl that was trying to kill him. Now you're telling me that
Gig saw him hallucinate twice. Once after his boat flipped in Miles
Canyon, and again when he saw northern lights out on the ice. He
sounds like he had a few loose screws."

Zimmerman shakes his head. "Wylie had his
head screwed on – ask anyone in Dawson. Gig never saw that girl and
I never saw her neither, but that don't mean she wasn't there, even
though she was gone when Wylie got back. After that he wouldn't
sleep outside under the lights. If he was on a winter tramp and the
sky was glowing, he'd wrap himself in furs and blankets and sit all
night against a tree with his rifle at his side."

Chapter 24

When Garrett and Wylie reached Dawson the
following day, Zimmerman tells me, they found a frenzy of activity
on the frozen mud flat below the mouth of the Klondike. Hundreds of
lots had been staked off and sold by Joe Ladue, and his sawmill was
operating around the clock, cutting lumber for the cabins and
commercial buildings rising on the town's emerging grid. In Ladue's
saloon, stampeders from Fortymile and Circle queried miners who'd
come down from the creeks for supplies. A rising tide of gold dust
was already circulating, since gold was the one commodity whose
supply now appeared inexhaustible. Men who had started digging
toward bedrock on their Bonanza or Eldorado claims could wash out
whatever sellers were asking for a few pounds of salt or beef or
candles or nails – or anything else they needed to keep working
through the winter. And while the supply boats remained iced in at
their moorings far downriver, more Klondike hopefuls arrived over
the ice, sending prices sky high. Prospectors who couldn't afford
to work their claims also couldn't afford to buy food for their
dogs, so they had to kill them if they couldn't find a buyer.

"Gig and Wylie sized up the situation after a
few hours talking with the fellers who come into the saloon,"
Zimmerman says. "By then it was the end of December, and Bonanza
and Eldorado was staked top to bottom two months ago, with plenty
of claims overlapping or measured wrong. The Canadian government
said they was going to send a surveyor to straighten things out.
Maybe when that happened there would be pieces of claims freed up,
but you couldn't guess if they'd be big enough to pay. And the
limit was one claim per man in the Klondike district, so most
fellers wanted all five hundred feet.

"Even with a thousand miners in the Klondike
valley by the end of '96, there was still rich ground for the
taking on the hillsides above the creeks, but nobody knowed about
bench gold yet. So them that missed Bonanza or Eldorado was pushing
further up the valley and staking on Hunker Creek and its pups.
Sometimes all it took to start a stampede from Dawson was for
someone to check the filings at the commissioner's office and
notice a new discovery claim. Word would spread through the saloons
and a posse or two would drain their whiskeys, throw supplies for a
week on a sled, and mush off toward the next Eldorado.

"Of course them fellers would come right back
to record the claims they staked. After recording, a man who come
to Dawson with nothing might put his feet up in the saloon while
other miners was spending the time and money to find out what that
new creek was worth. Or maybe he'd just sell the claim for a few
weeks of grub to someone who had the means to work it.

"Gig and Wylie was better off than some. They
had a good team of dogs, a tent and stove, food for a month, and a
little dust left in their pokes. They needed to stake the best
ground they could find, even if they couldn't work it yet, and then
they needed to find shelter for the winter. It was twelve dollars a
day to bunk at one of the taverns, but the lumber and carpenters
you needed for a cabin would cost hundreds. They couldn't feed the
dogs, so they needed to find a buyer, the sooner the better.

"They got lucky on that score, 'cause
Clarence Berry was down from 6 Eldorado, where his hired men was
burning shafts to bedrock. He needed to move sluice-box lumber and
grub up to the creeks, and money wasn't a problem. Berry got rich
by staking his claim on Eldorado and trading his way into two more.
Worked another claim on Bonanza at the same time, so to pay wages
he was washing out a hundred and fifty dollars every day. That
might be ten days' diggings at Miller Creek at Fortymile, but on 6
Eldorado it took ten minutes and two or three pans. Berry already
knowed that if he could use dogs to move supplies and keep his men
working all winter, he was going to need horses to haul all that
gold down to the assay office in the fall, after cleaning up his
winter dumps and summer diggings.

"In August '96, when George Carmack walked
into a saloon at Fortymile and showed off his shotgun shell full of
Klondike gold, Berry was already three years on the Inside with
nothing to show for it, and his spirit was beaten thin as paper.
What he heared from Carmack sounded like just another hoax with
seeded gold, and it took the woman he carried in over the pass and
down the Yukon to convince him to go visit Lying George's claim on
Bonanza.

"Before the year was out it was hard to tell
how much Berry was worth. Hundreds of thousands, maybe more. Them
hard-luck cases from Fortymile was the first to take a chance on
the Klondike, and a few got lucky, but mostly the handful that
stuck with it and didn't sell or give up was the ones that got
rich. That's how it was with the Klondike Kings."

Zimmerman has been veering off course, so I
steer him back to my quarry.

"So Gig and Wylie sold Nokes' dog team to
Clarence Berry?"

"Kept the sled and sold the dogs for three
hundred dollars. That didn't sound like much to Gig, who just come
from Circle where dogs was fetching two hundred each from miners
that was desperate to get to the Klondike. But in Dawson everyone
was starting to realize that the next steamboat was six months
away, and there was more people and dogs than food."

"How long did it take Nokes and his partner
to figure out Gig wasn't coming back with their supplies?"

Zimmerman's eyes glimmer and he cracks a
grin. "Hard to say. They probably went down to Circle after a
couple weeks, when they was running low on food. That's a long
tramp in the snow from the head of Mammoth Creek, when you got no
sled and no dogs. There's other miners working claims on Birch
Creek along the way, so they wasn't going to starve – any sourdough
with a winter cabin and a stove will share his dinner with a feller
that needs help. But you can bet Nokes was fixing to string Gig up
if they found him in the saloons, drinking away their winter
grubstake.

"What they wasn't expecting was to see Circle
emptied out, and when Nokes heared everyone was off to the
Klondike, he must of reckoned they all gone mad. That was the thing
with those oldtimers that took ten or twenty thousand out of the
ground in a year's work at Fortymile or Circle. They knowed what a
gold stream looked like. They seen the Klondike, and plenty of 'em
had walked its creeks like Nokes, and they knowed that wasn't it.
So them fellers never got rich like Clarence Berry or Tom Lippy or
Antone Stander.

"Most of the saloons in Circle was shut down,
but there was probably still a few businesses open when Nokes got
there, so someone must of told him that Gig ran off to Dawson with
Wylie and the dog team. Maybe Nokes went looking at the hotels for
a note from Gig, but he probably realized pretty quick that there
wasn't none. If Circle was still going strong, Nokes would of
called a miners meeting and it would only take ten minutes for the
sourdoughs to hear his case and vote. Then Gig would have been
fined and banished. If he ever set foot in Circle again, they'd
send him downriver in an empty canoe.